Software Freedom Day

Software freedom promotes respect for human rights.

Transcript

The 20th of September is
Software Freedom Day.
Hundreds of groups in more than 90 countries celebrate the benefits of
free software.
These events don't get much media attention, but they
should remind us that transparent, sustainable technology
is important to everyone. [1]

Software Freedom Day began in 2004, but the free software
movement began much earlier. In September, 1983, Richard
Stallman announced his plan to write a free software system
that he called GNU,
spelled G-N-U. In 1985 he proclaimed
The GNU Manifesto, which remains a key
statement of the ideology of software freedom.

Free software is not about cost. It's about liberty.
According to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
everyone has the right to freedom of expression and
participation in society. The expression of these rights
entails software freedom: the freedom to study and modify source code,
the freedom to share software with other people, and the freedom
to store and exchange data in open formats.

The concept of software freedom may seem alien to many
people. It took me 20 years to fully embrace it. I wrote my
first computer program in 1971 and then developed proprietary
software in the 1980s. I made a little money from my
software, but I began to realize that my activities somehow
violated my value system.

In the late 1980s events in China and eastern Europe made
me think seriously about human rights, especially freedom of
expression. At that time I was studying the Unix operating system
and communicating with others around the world on
Usenet.
I could see that the Internet might someday enable people
to freely share experiences and ideas. Along with others, I
realized that global participation would require open data
formats and that people would need freedom to develop, modify,
and share software in order to make the Internet work.

By 1992 all of these ideas had come together.
I was able to run a free operating system on my
personal computers [2]
and to use free software as a major part of a new computer
network at my university. Since then I've done most of my
computing with free software, and I've taught more than a
thousand university students how to use the
GNU Emacs text editor
and other excellent free
software. [3]